Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

I am in a moment of pretty wellness.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

It is a good success to take people from the city to the forests; but there is a much greater success: To bring the forest to the people, to the cities! To bring heaven to the hell!

I have taken pride in others, never in myself.

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.

I was sort of caught up in my own web of illusion.

Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain.

Occasionally I'll just pull out a rifle and shoot one of my audience members. So far there have been no complaints filed.